


Chemistry

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, M/M, Multi, Murderous bastards, Murderous bastards in love, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The world is theirs for the taking, or for the burning. The only thing that matters is which they choose.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chemistry

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't get this to come out right, so consider this merely a first draft.

The world is theirs for the taking, or for the burning. The only thing that matters is which they choose.

Silva began skimming the cream of MI6 a long time ago. A faultless sniper here; a master of disguise there. Little bits and pieces, not much perhaps individually, but each a cut to make M’s world bleed until it fell to its knees. In the end, it would be simple and elegant: the only options left a transfusion of _his_ agents (infection or inheritance?), or death. 

Yet he doesn’t care which is chosen. He wins, he conquers, and that is all that ever matters. Perhaps little Tiago Rodriguez might carry concerns, or demand a more visible, _obvious_ , victory; but that man died screaming, and Raoul Silva, if anything, would prefer to sip champagne in the shadows. Other people’s opinions are insignificant, after all. What need has he for the validation of others’ opinions? M taught him that the greatest work lies in secrets; M taught him his old ways were, well, precisely that.

Silva enjoys looking over his empire; enjoys its simplicity of essence , before entangling oneself in the necessities of subterfuge and infiltration (like a virus, basic in thought, intricate in design – they know a thing or two about that). Perhaps two hundred agents at his command, but all so very loyal. He has always had his way with people – sees their minds, sees the truths that will break them. Even as Tiago, he had a reputation for a forked tongue that spoke no lies. 

Add to that mother’s way with betrayal, and he – or everybody else – was doomed. After all, men were nothing without their mothers.

The enterprise appears small, but naturally size doesn’t matter. His family is the best, and the challenge is the important part anyway. A rival organisation to Mother’s. The sons will inherit – and if Mother won’t die, then they’ll just have to find another way to seize the family jewels.

Perhaps it confused some, why he left Bond as long as he did. They didn’t understand why Silva might appreciate simply watching somebody be the best at what they did. He attended the finest operas; he gambled alongside the smoothest cardcheats; he sipped deliciously obscure reds and delighted in obersving as fine a killer as Bond.

A little rough around the edges, naturally. But diamonds in the rough remained diamonds.

What he had really been looking for was the opportunity: the sign that Bond was ripe for the picking, as it were. All it took was simply waiting for Mother’s inevitable mistake – showing her age, the poor dear, with a son so ready for rebellion. One little detail, one lie, one death, one bullet, and Bond would come to him, as easily as falling.

Waiting and talking. Silva’s two specialities. (The hacking helps, he won’t deny that in a fit of independence and drama, but really, what is hacking but patience and manipulation? That is, at least, when it comes to his own variety.)

The reward, should anybody find it necessary to ask, is evident in Silva’s other prize.

Bond is a man of principles – surprising as some might find that assessment, but then, people had such narrow-minded conceptions of what ‘principles’ were implied by the word – and above all a man of action. He once believed in Queen and Country and MI6 and even, Heaven forbid, good and evil. Granted, they were never the good and evil schoolboys learnt by rote, yet there was undeniably a right side and a wrong side within that delightfully tortured psyche. No matter what M’s sins, it seemed, the actions of both her and her agency were justified because they were not those of the opposition. MI6 assassinated; its enemies slaughtered. Bond might have described his employment as murder (Silva allowed himself a titter at this slice of wordplay), yet he balanced cynicism and ideals with a finesse that showed how this one man from the old line survived the Cold War.

Survival is an attribute Silva more than values. Life might be a disease, but then, some viruses are beneficial. If only to those who last the onslaught.

Yet in watching Bond so very closely, peering through peepholes to seek out that crack in the defences

he found somebody looking back.

MI6 prides itself on its background checks, Silva knows this, yet pride really is such a gloriously insidious sin. Pride is confidence, and confidence means you think you can control something because you have the power. Over-confidence is not realising just how readily power jumps to the hands of those who truly understands how to wield it.

M herself offered her latest head of Q branch _carte blanche_ , once again trading her precious laws for a winning hand. Silva can’t help but admire the technique (as he has said before, he loves to watch the best), the same way he can’t help but admire the young boy who thinks he’s a man, dark eyes glinting behind obscuring glasses, every inch of him a disguise engineered to hide the fact that it is a disguise. He takes to a new identity – an identity free of any defining features, like his nicknames and aliases of before – a little readily, had anybody at MI6 bothered to watch.

(Silva is glad that he was watching. For a performance like this to go unwitnessed and unappreciated would truly be a tragedy.)

Of course, M knows there’s more to him. But their shared mother likes to think that she can control her cards, forgetting of course that time is endlessly passing, the rats are circling, and the house is wavering.

Q is, quite simply, delightful – so much so that Silva allows himself the luxury of savouring the seduction.

The embedded codes, the battling viruses, the encrypted messages: the circling courtship of the twenty-first century. Q knows that Silva is there but doesn’t say a word; he keeps him like a guilty secret and oh, Silva does so like to be one of those. He’s certainly had enough experience.

Q has his own brand of arrogance: the young man grown fast into a stumbling muted world. Silva scatters his breadcrumbs, and anticipates the moment Q’s world breaks into sparkling stinging high-definition.

As for Bond?

M sends him to Silva herself.

Not that she knows its her Tiago, of course (it’s not), nor that she won’t be losing Bond the way she thinks. She dispatches him to his death in thanks for surviving her first attempt, relying on the stubborn loyalty of the old dog. But Silva has more than a few new tricks.

(God, Bond is _delicious_.)

Q comes a few weeks later, blinking in the sunlight. Silva meets those eyes, free of their prison, and sees what glorious work they have in their future. Q’s work is slightly more elegant than his own, perhaps, but Silva knows better than to be jealous. Instead, he encourages it – reminds Q that really, not caring about the world is an advantage. Bond might enjoy his heady, exhausting whirl, but for Q’s work, well, nothingness is strength.

(They have a game, himself and Bond. Q might not always come to them, so caught up in the world he’s fashioned for himself that Bond cannot comprehend and in which Silva can only delight; instead, they go to him, and go to work, until Q’s breath and fingers stutter and really, it is these shadowy victories that taste the sweetest.)

It’s the same way that Silva simply cannot be jealous of the years which had crafted Bond into the divine weapon that he has become, all messy empathies and compromising emotions carefully filed off and refined into death. That is why at the head of this family stand three men. 

(He wonders what they’re doing to him in exchange. No, he is in control, he knows this: their world is his world, built on nothing but the truth, and without him, there is no greater plan. Just as he likes to rely on them to build something truly magnificent.)

Q and Bond each have their own skills and specialities, but it takes Silva to bring them together; to create something new, and extraordinary, and unique. It takes Silva to draw them out of their respective habits of thinking too small (hacking the Pentagon, _really_ , so childish, so _eighties_ ) and too much of meaningless service. It takes Silva to show the two of them the world at their fingertips.

Bond has such a mind for missions; such an appetite for destruction. He comes home smelling of gunpowder and blood and shaking with such need that Silva almost feels like they’re indulging him. As for Q, he might still consider himself above them all, but now at least he has reason to do so. A few caresses and that ego is finally allowed to grow into itself. It really is a matter of opening up one’s mind to the possibilities, Silva finds.

They both take to it so easily; to each other, also. Chemical reactions. Silva allows himself a smug smile at his own capacity as a talent scout. It wasn’t about creating something new; it was about coaxing out what was already there: the killers, the rulers. The bloody violence and the clinical detachment (he wonders which the world might fear more, the death in Bond’s eyes as he goes in for the kill, or the lack of it in Q’s – or perhaps its his own enjoyment).

Silva really is very good at his job.

They could take the world, or burn it. There really is no question that they could do either.

They still haven’t decided which would be more fun.


End file.
